I touched on this on Friday in a post on John le Carre, where I quoted Le Carre (originally quoted in Donald McCormick's Who's Who in Spy Fiction, 1977) dismissing 007, a character he apparently despises.

MacDonald is by any standards a better writer than Saul Bellow, only MacDonald writes thrillers and Bellow is a human-heart chap, so guess who wears the top-grade laurels?'Īmis also takes to task some of the ill-informed criticism of Fleming and Bond. But this best is horribly rare, and a clumsy dissection of the heart is so much worse than boring as to be painful, and most contemporary novels are like spy novels with no spies or crime novels with no crimes, and John D. It might well be agreed that the best of serious fiction, so to call it, is better than anything any genre can offer.

'I lament what I take to be a trend against the genres. Here's a passage from the piece to that effect: I suspected that was the case – after all, Amis wote an entire book's worth of considered criticism on Fleming's creation ( The James Bond Dossier, 1965 he also penned a more humorous look at 007, The Book of Bond, published the same year) – but 'A New James Bond' confirms it. is a uniquely, odiously painful activity not really worth the money, in fact') and Lefty baiting (although he admits that did become 'a major fringe benefit') to state simply that he considered it 'an honour to have been selected to follow in the footsteps of Ian Fleming'.īecause the thing is – and as I conjectured in this post on Amis – to the exasperation of many, including possibly Martin Amis, Kingsley Amis genuinely admired the work of Fleming and other genre writers, rating some of them as highly as other, more literary types. In it, Amis counters the criticism he faced when he agreed to write a Bond novel, dismissing accusations of profiteering ('most people who have done much writing will probably agree on reflection that to write at length just for money.

I'm not sure where it originally appeared, but it was published around the same time as Amis's pseudonymous Bond novel Colonel Sun (written as Robert Markham) and is a spirited defense of both that book and of Ian Fleming and Bond in general. The first of those is a 1968 piece – and its three addenda – titled 'A New James Bond'. But there are two essays in particular which are pertinent both to the preoccupations of this blog and my wider preoccupations.

Colonel sun robert markham